Before switching my first degree major to Communications Studies at the UWI, my major was linguistics - the scientific study of human language.
During my first two semesters I was exposed to an introduction to languages and their elements, all of which gave me a glimpse into the nuances of a few of the thousands of languages in the world.
The Oxford dictionary defines language as 'the system of communication in speech and writing that is used by people of a particular country or area,' with morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology being the five major elements.
Following the sudden hospitalisation and subsequent death (still unbelievable) of my brother-in-law, Mark, two weeks ago, my interest in languages has resurfaced. Not because he was a linguist, but because of his fluency in a form of communication to which I had never consciously paid any attention before.
He was a chef by profession, and at his wake, funeral, and even in casual conversation, literally everyone spoke about how good his food always was. But the goodness of the food never seemed to stand alone. It was always juxtaposed with his humility and generosity, almost as if they were one and the same.
And although I recently discovered that culinary linguistics - the study of food and language across various interdisciplinary fields - is actually a thing, I realised that Mark added something extra to the existing elements - food science and nutrition, the quality of the ingredients, seasonality, flavours and textures, styling and colour on the plate. I'm convinced that the love, heart and soul he put into it was what gave him easy access to the hearts of the men, women and children with whom he interacted, and it was what made him so fluent in 'Uncle Mark,' as he was fondly called. 'Yuh eat yet?' was, oftentimes, the second question he asked whenever I visited his home. 'Wha happening?' was always his first as he came out of the kitchen, usually with some type of sauce splattered over his clothes; or looked up from reading a newspaper cover to cover, playing a game of solitaire or doing a sudoku puzzle.
His parts of speech were his ingredients which, when conjugated in his enormous pots, turned out to be the most delicious expression of love ever, always served up in generous helpings. His plosives (consonant produced by forming a complete obstruction to the flow of air out of the mouth, like the English letters p and t) were the sounds of his cooking utensils knocking against each other. His fricatives (consonants produced when air escapes through a small passage and make a hissing sound, for example the letters s and z) were the sizzling of the food while he cooked. His sentences and paragraphs were the plated end-result, heaped with love.
I vividly recall eating the food his dad had cooked for his (Mark's) and my sister Sharon's wedding over two decades ago and thinking to myself, 'this is the best food I have ever tasted at a wedding.' I guess that was the source of h
